Chapter 9 NORTH AND SOUTH

"Where do you and the Charlotte go when you leave here, Frederick?" his sister inquired as the family sat at breakfast the next morning.

"New Orleans, I suppose; we touch there for a cargo of cotton," was the reply.

"Then you'll see the crop gathered, won't you, Uncle Frederick?" Mary put in.

"Hardly that, lassie," replied her uncle kindly. "All the work will be done before I arrive. However, I shall not mind that for I have seen southern cotton fields in their prime before now."

"It grows everywhere in the South, doesn't it?" Mary ventured.

"One could hardly say that, my dear," Captain Dillingham responded with a mild shake of his head. "On the contrary the cotton belt of the United States is comparatively small considering the vast crops it yields."

"Why don't they make it bigger and plant more cotton?" questioned Tim.

"Cotton, as I told you, sonny, has its own ideas as to where it will grow. Let it be planted farther north than forty-five degrees and it will only thrive under glass; or try to cultivate it farther south than the thirty-five degree line and it will also balk. This, you see, leaves a rather narrow zone that answers its demands in the way of temperature and soil. For the kind of soil cotton likes has to be considered also. If the land is too sandy the moisture will soon dry up and the plants shrivel; or if there is an undue proportion of clay the excess moisture will not drain off and the plants will run to wood and leaves. Therefore you have the problem of getting the right proportions of clay, loam and sand in a climate where the temperature holds practically even."

"Why, I shouldn't think any spot on earth would fill that bill," grinned Carl.

"We do succeed in getting just such areas, however," returned Captain Dillingham. "North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Florida, Tennessee, Indian Territory, Missouri, Virginia, Kentucky, Kansas, and Oklahoma all contrive to answer the requirements to a greater or less degree. These States boast soils that are blends of clay, sand, and loam in the desired proportions; and while some of them are better than others both soil and temperature are such that cotton can be grown in them. Given these two assets the rest of the conundrum is up to the planter."

"I should think most of it was answered for him when he has these two important factors," Mrs. McGregor asserted.

"But to have climate and land is not enough," protested her brother. "Once he possesses the land the owner must take care of it. It cannot be allowed to run out but must be plowed up, fertilized, and the crop tended like any other farm product. Before cotton growers realized this, not much attention was paid to these laws and in consequence the crop of many a southern plantation suffered. Now cotton-raising is done far more scientifically. The old stalks are gathered and destroyed; the land is plowed and fertilized, and afterward seed-planting machines go up and down the rows, scattering five or six seeds into each hole, with a space of not more than a foot between the holes. Then the seeds are covered over lightly and left to sprout."

"How long is it before they come up?" interrogated Carl.

"About ten or twelve days," was the reply. "A couple of days later the first leaf appears and then trouble begins. April sees the Carolina planters thinning their shoots in order to have sturdy plants from which to select the ones eventually allowed to grow. States farther south get at the task earlier. After the thinning process is over the plants are hilled up like potatoes and the spaces between the rows, where the last season's crop previously grew, is plowed to keep the soil open and free for drainage. Men afterward travel through the open rows hoeing up the loose soil and heaping it around the young plants to strengthen and protect them; then, since nothing more can be done immediately everybody takes a rest and waits."

"Then what happens?" piped Tim.

"Oh, after a time the same process is repeated. The earth by this time has become crusted over and must be opened up again; the hauling, too, takes place once more. Hauling is the name given to bedding up the plants with loose earth. Often there are four or five haulings. By July the plants have grown sufficiently to show which one in each hill is to be the most thrifty and this one is left to grow while the other shoots are pulled up. After that, given sunny days and occasional light showers, the crop should prosper. Should there, however, be too much heat, or too great a quantity of rain, things will not move so successfully."

"How long does cotton have to grow before it is ready for picking?" asked Carl.

"The plants bloom approximately the middle of June-sometimes earlier, sometimes later, according to the climates of the various States. Two months after that the crop is ready to be gathered. You must not, however, run away with the notion that cotton-picking is a hurried process. Often it goes on from the end of August until into November or December. It is a long-drawn-out, tedious, monotonous task. Whole families join in the harvesting for since there is always some low and some tall cotton (some annual and some perennial varieties) the children can share with their elders in the work and thus earn quite a sum of money. In fact, in the old days before child labor laws protected the kiddies, and while cotton-picking was done by slaves, many a poor little mite toiled cruelly long in the fields. Even the older negroes were driven with whips and compelled to keep at work until utterly exhausted."

His audience gasped.

"Yes," nodded their uncle, "I am afraid that urged forward by the desire to garner a big crop before rain should fall and spoil it, the cotton growers practiced much cruelty. No doubt, too, the same tyranny reigned in India. Wherever work must be done by hand and labor is cheap and plentiful, human beings come to be classed to a great extent as machines. Plantation owners become so interested in the money they are to make that they forget everything else. Of course labor was never as cheap in our Southern States even during slave days as in India and therefore until the advent of the cotton gin cotton was not one of our valuable crops."

"You mean because the seeds had to be picked out by hand?" Carl said.

"Yes. There was, to be sure, the primitive kind of gin resorted to in India for cleaning certain black-seed varieties. Two kinds of this black-seed, or long-stapled cotton, grew in the Sea Islands and along the coast from Delaware to Georgia; but it could not be made to thrive away from the moist ocean climate. Hence on inland plantations a different and more vigorous variety of plant (one having green seeds and short staples) was propagated. This kind was known as Upland cotton. It was a troublesome product for the planters, I assure you, for its many seeds clung so tightly to the lint that it was almost out of the question to remove them. The simple little gin copied from India and successfully used on the black seed variety was entirely impracticable on this Upland growth since it tore the fibers all to bits."

"They did need a cotton gin, didn't they!" Carl ejaculated.

"Very badly, indeed," agreed Captain Dillingham. "Well, the only substitute for machinery was fingers; and when I tell you that it often took an entire day to get out of a three-pound batch of cotton a pound or so that was clear of seeds you will understand what a slow process it was."

"At that rate I shouldn't think it would have paid anybody to raise cotton," sniffed Carl.

"It didn't," returned his uncle. "Moreover it rendered the product very expensive, for it required a great number of slaves to clean any considerable quantity of cotton. I often think of the toil and misery that went into the cotton-growing of those slavery days. After working for a long stretch of hours in the blazing sun the negroes came in at night worn out. But were they allowed to rest? Perhaps some of them who had considerate owners were; but many, many others less fortunate were set to picking out seeds and lest they fall asleep at their task overseers prodded them with whips."

"Gee!"

"That was slavery, son," declared Captain Dillingham. "Do you wonder that Abraham Lincoln thought it would be worth even a war to rid this country of such an evil? Understand, I am not condemning all slave owners. Undoubtedly there were kind and humane ones just as there are to this day employers who are fair with their help. But urged on by commercial greed the temptation of the planters was to force the slaves to do more than was right, and as a result a great deal of cruelty was practiced. Had the primitive method of picking cotton by hand continued it is probable that slavery might have died a natural death without recourse to war, for many of the Southerners were reaching a point where the returns from cotton and tobacco were not sufficient to feed the army of slaves that swarmed over the plantations. To use a common phrase the slaves were eating their heads off. It was just at this juncture, however, that Eli Whitney came along with his cotton gin and in a twinkling the South became revolutionized and the problem of the legion of idle, profitless slaves was settled. They would now be idle and profitless no longer. Vast quantities of cotton could henceforth be planted and the negroes could cultivate and gather it. With Eli Whitney's gin to do the slow and hindering part of the process cotton-raising could be made a paying industry."

"Mr. Whitney bobbed up in the very nick of time, didn't he?" smiled Mary.

"For the financial prosperity of the South he did," her uncle responded. "But to the welfare of the negroes his advent was a fatal stroke. Slaves immediately were more in demand than they ever had been before. No mechanical device could take their place. Cotton must be planted, cultivated, and harvested by hand and the larger the cotton fields became, the harder the slaves were worked. The cotton crop became the staple product of the South. Many a Southerner who took up arms against the Union did so because he honestly believed that to free the slaves would mean the economic ruin of his section of the country."

"I never thought of that side of the question before," Mrs. McGregor murmured thoughtfully.

"Nor I," rejoined Carl.

"Nevertheless it is a fact none of us here in the North should forget," continued Captain Dillingham. "To the southern planter our point of view appeared unfair and grossly one-sided. It was easy enough for the North to say the slaves should be freed. They had no cotton fields and their prosperity was not dependent on the negroes. But to let the slaves go meant ruin for the South. It was not alone, you see, that their owners wished the profit derived from buying and selling them; they needed them to work. Never had the South had such an opportunity to coin wealth as that now opening. What wonder its residents were angry at having this dazzling prospect for fortune-making snatched away? Remember and take these facts into consideration when you think harshly of those who took up arms to defend slavery."

There was an instant's pause.

"Of course, however, none of this justifies slavery or makes it more right. The entire principle of it was wrong; it was un-Christian, unjust, and cruel, and the only honorable thing to do was to bring it to an end in this country. But that is another story altogether. What we are talking about now is the cotton itself; and to get a big view of this subject it is well to consider what was happening in the world just at this time, and why cotton was such a desirable commodity.

"Over across the ocean James Watts's steam engine, combined with the flying shuttle of John Kay, the spinning jenny of Hargreaves, the water-frame of Arkwright, and the self-acting loom of Crompton, was working as great a revolution in England's cloth-making industry as Eli Whitney's cotton gin had done in the South. In other words the hand loom had been supplanted by the more modern device of the steam-driven spinning mill. This meant that in future cloth would no longer be made in small quantities in the homes, women of the families spinning the thread and weaving it whenever they could steal a bit of time from other household duties. No! Cloth was to be made in factories on a much larger scale, and sold to the public."

"No wonder the fact set everybody to raising cotton!" declared Mrs. McGregor.

"No wonder indeed!" nodded her brother. "From a vintage so small that even President Jefferson scarcely knew America had a cotton crop at all this product of the South leaped forward by bounds. The year preceding Eli Whitney's invention the United States exported less than one hundred and forty thousand bales; but the year afterward the shipment had soared to nearly half a million. The following year it was a million and a half; the year after that six million."

"Gee whizz!" commented Carl. "That was some record, wasn't it?"

"Rather!" agreed his uncle.

"How much do we export now, Uncle Frederick?" Mary asked.

"From nine to twelve million bales of five-hundred pounds each are raised annually in the South," returned Captain Dillingham. "Of this about ninety per cent. is Upland cotton, the green seeds of which have to be taken out by a gin similar to the one Eli Whitney invented. Approximately about half this vast crop is exported."

"I had no idea we raised so much cotton," mused Carl.

"We raise quantities of it, son," Uncle Frederick said. "Now you can understand better why the South was so resentful at being compelled to free the slaves. With cotton so much in demand the prices of slaves had greatly increased. The planters had untold wealth almost within their grasp. It was all very well for the North to assert that slavery was a barbarous practise. Who was to tend the cotton fields when the slaves were gone?"

"The South did have something on its side, didn't it?" Mary ventured.

"A great deal, when once you put yourself in the Southerner's place. We in the North are liable to emphasize only the cruelty of slavery and are often unable to understand how enlightened and Christian men could keep slaves and fight to keep them. You see there were reasons."

Mary nodded.

"Of course, as I said before, all the cotton-raising in the world could not make the thing right. It was wrong from start to finish. Nevertheless it does explain why some of our people felt the freeing of the slaves so unjust and such a blow to their prosperity that they threatened secession from the Union."

"And it was because Abraham Lincoln would not allow them to secede that the war was fought!" announced Carl triumphantly.

"Precisely! You cannot allow part of a country to rise up and walk out any more than you can let some of the wheels of a watch announce they are not going to turn any more," laughed his uncle. "It requires every part to make the watch go; and it takes the united strength of a people to make a nation. North and South were all beloved children of one land, and Abraham Lincoln, like the father of a big family, was not going to let any of the household break away from the organization to which it belonged. It meant a struggle to do the two things necessary-free the slaves and preserve the Union; but quarrels are sometimes necessary in families. After they are over there is a more perfect understanding. So it has been with this one. Both sides paid a fearful price but as a result we now have one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

"That's the oath of allegiance!" cried Carl, Mary, and Tim in chorus, as they leaped to their feet and stood at salute.

"We say it at school every morning," continued Tim, "but I never knew before what it meant."

"You will know better now, won't you?" Captain Dillingham replied. "Every time you say those words remember the brave men of the South who really believed they had a right to establish a government of their own and protect the prosperity of their part of this great land. If you do this you will learn to honor both sides alike, each of which fought so devotedly for the cause he cherished. And now that the war is over the entire country has the South to thank for one of its greatest sources of wealth-cotton. The South raises it; the North, with its many mills, transforms the raw product into a finished commodity. How is that for team work? Could there be better proof of how vitally each section needs the other?"